Little | Margaret Isabel

Margaret Little was born in Bedford on 21st May 1901. She went to a Froebel Kindergarten and after to the Bedford High School for Girls. She read medicine and completed her clinical training at St Mary's Hospital in 1927. From 1928 to 1939 she acted as a general practitioner in Edgware, London. During this time she had been a clinical assistant at the Tavistock Institute for Psychotherapy (1936 to 1939) and had already started a private psychotherapy practice.

In 1936 she sought the help of an unnamed Jungian analyst. This analyst encouraged her to train at the Tavistock Insitute and introduced her to Ella Sharpe with whom she subsequently began an analysis in 1941. She was elected as an Associate Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPS) in 1945 and a Full Member the following year. Following Ella Sharpe's death in 1947, she was analysed by Marion Milner and then Donald Winnicott. Margaret Little was very active in the affairs of the BPS and held various posts including Honorary Business Secretary and Training Committee Secretary . She also became a Training Analyst in 1949.

Margaret Little is particularly known for her contributions on counter-transference and from 1951 until 1967 she published a number of papers on this theme.

In the late 1960s she met and lived with journalist Reg Sizen with whom she bought a cottage in Sundridge, Kent. In 1971 following Sizen's death and that of Donald Winnicott she retired from practice in London and moved to the cottage.

Besides her work as a psychoanalyst Margaret Little was a painter and poet. An anthology of her essays and poems was published in 1981 under the title 'Transference Neurosis and Transference Psychosis. Toward Basic Unity'.

Margaret Little moved again to Dunton Green, Kent where she made a devoted friend Peter Evans who would be with her for the remaining years of her life.

Physician and psychoanalyst

Date of death sourced from the Margaret Boyle Spelman's book 'The Evolution of Winnicott's Thinking'.

ISO 8601-1:2019, Date and time - Representations for information interchange.
National Council on Archives - Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names, 1997.
International Council on Archives - International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings (ISDIAH), 2008.

Revised 2024-04-04

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Revised by Ewan O'Neill